Page:Metamorphoses.djvu/437

 METAMORPHOSES BOOK VIII is in vain; you have forgotten my deserts in vain; I shall follow you against your will, and clinging to the curving stern, I shall be drawn over the long reaches of the sea." Scarce had she spoken when she leaped into the water, swam after the ship, her passion giving strength, and clung, hateful and un- welcome, to the Cretan boat. When her father saw her-for he was hovering in the air, having but now been changed into an osprey with tawny wings-he came on that he might tear her, as she clung there, with his hooked beak. In terror she let go her hold upon the boat, and as she fell the light air seemed to hold her up and keep her from touching the water. She was like a feather! Changed to a feathered bird, she is called Ciris, and takes this name from the shorn lock of hair.1 Minos duly paid his vows to Jove, a hundred bulls, when he disembarked upon the Cretan strand; and he hung up his spoils of war to adorn his palace. But now his family's disgrace had grown big, and the queen's foul adultery was revealed to all by her strange hybrid monster-child. Minos planned to remove cis shame from his house and to hide it away in a labyrinthine enclosure with blind passages. Daedalus, a man famous for his skill in the builder's art, planned and performed the work. He confused the usual passages and deceived the eye by a con- flicting maze of divers winding paths. Just as the watery Maeander plays in the Phrygian fields, flows back and forth in doubtful course and, turning back on itself, beholds its own waves coming on their way, and sends its uncertain waters now towards their source and now towards the open sea: so Daedalus made those innumerable winding passages, and was 1 Ciris, as if from xelpw, "I cut." 417